Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog: Incoming Links

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Com­pleted So Far:

So far, we have cov­ered pretty much all of the basic infor­ma­tion we need to know on how to opti­mize a blog so that search engine bots and spi­ders can find the site and rank it high on search engine results pages so that vis­i­tors can also find it. The final basic search engine opti­miza­tion tech­nique looks at the third type of link, incom­ing links.

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New Devel­op­ments:

Of the three types of links (inter­nal, out­go­ing, and incom­ing) incom­ing links are by far the most dif­fi­cult to achieve, and, of course, are one of, if not the most impor­tant search engine opti­miz­ing tech­nique you can have on a website/blog.

Incom­ing or inbound links are links that are made from some­one else’s website/blog to your website/blog.  These links con­nect the two sites, encour­ag­ing vis­i­tors, and search engine bots and spi­ders, to travel for one site to the other. Like every­thing else related to search engine opti­miza­tion, there are dif­fer­ent qual­i­ties of incom­ing links.

The best incom­ing links are:

• from sites that are highly ranked
• are rel­e­vant to your topic, and
• use rel­e­vant and searched for keywords.

Incom­ing links that are not so great include:

• links from link farms
• link exchanges from sites that have no rela­tion to the topic that your website/blog is about.
• pur­chased links. These can get very expen­sive and be quite risky. In fact it could back­fire on you if you have to many of this type of link on your website/blog.

Tech­niques that you can use to use to gen­er­ate incom­ing links are often referred to as ‘link bait’ and include such things as:

Use great ‘link bait’ to attract high qual­ity incom­ing links. source: lala­jean, Flickr Cre­ative Commons

• cre­at­ing great con­tent. Use­ful, infor­ma­tive, well writ­ten con­tent can gen­er­ate inter­est in your site and encour­age other web­site or blog author’s to link to your con­tent as a way to enhance their content
• inter­link­ing your own sites. If you write more than one website/blog, then you can gen­er­ate incom­ing links to each of your sites from the other one(s). Be care­ful not to overdo it. Search engine bots and spi­ders can detect if too many of your incom­ing links are from the same server as your site, and they don’t take too kindly to that.
• using search engine direc­to­ries. Most, if not all search engines have direc­to­ries, lists of web­sites and blogs that have been accu­mu­lated and sorted into top­ics. Google’s direc­tory can be fond at http://directory.google.com/. There is some ques­tion as to whether the effort of get­ting your web­site or blog listed in a direc­tory gen­er­ates enough traf­fic to you site t be worth the effort.

ProBlogger’s book, ProBlog­ger: Secrets for Blog­ging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income lists some ‘link-bait’ tech­niques that can be used to suc­cess­fully attract incom­ing links to your site:

• Tools: cre­ate a use­ful, fun, news­wor­thy or inter­est­ing tool.
• Quizzes: cre­ate quizzes, sur­veys, and tests.
• Com­pe­ti­tions: orga­nize a con­test or draw­ing with a valu­able prize.
• Scoops: be first with the news or to try some­thing new.
• Awards: cre­ate an award for your niche.
• Lists: cre­ate a list of the 10 best blogs in your niche, or the top prod­ucts, etc.
• Sta­tis­tics: do a sur­vey and release the results.
• Free­bies: give away some­thing of value.
• Inter­views: inter­view a celebrity or some­one pop­u­lar in your niche.
• Resources: cre­ate the ulti­mate resource of ref­er­ence for a topic.

By fol­low­ing the search engine opti­miza­tion tech­niques and by updat­ing your site reg­u­larly, you should be able to attract both search­ing spi­ders and bots, and vis­i­tors to your site.

There is a quick and easy way to check to see if Google’s spi­ders and bots have been to your site and listed all of the con­tents. Go to the Google search site and type: site:(yourwebsite’surl), which will gen­er­ate a list of all the pages and posts that Google’s spi­ders and bots have located. So, for this blog, I would type site:www.agelessnomads.com to check out this site. You’re wel­come to type that into Google if you’d like, see what pages Google finds on this blog.

You can also check to see if any other web­sites or blogs have linked to your site. Again, go to a Google search box and type in link:(yourwebsite’surl). This will gen­er­ate a list of all the web­sites or blogs that have linked to yours.

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Next Step:

An extra step in Search Engine Opti­miz­ing Your Blog is to explore some of the more advanced options for adding key­words. These tech­niques take us out of the realm of WYSIWYG and into the realm of HTML and Meta-tags. For­tu­nately, this step is really not as dif­fi­cult as it sounds.

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If you liked this post, you can read this series on Search Engine Opti­miz­ing Your Blog from the begin­ning by going to the Intro­duc­tion post.

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